We don't need no steenkin' patches!
While I was gone this past week, Aspyr released the final patches for Jedi Academy (1.01c) and Knights of the Old Republic (1.03c). As such, I've removed the older beta ones from my site.
There are very few changes from the prior betas. Jedi Academy only has one fix, IIRC - it should give you a descriptive dialog if you are suddenly removed from a server now. KOTOR has a fix for some stray polygons that were obscuring geometry on the water world of Manaan in the prior beta of 1.03c.
Comments
Brad, I tried to find your email but i couldn't. KOTOR is a dream to play and I have thoroughly enjoyed it over the break, but I have another question OT. I thought I'd ask you as no one at apple seems to want to give me the time of day.
Do you have any experience with the OS X Package Maker? You have any idea how to get it to not destroy your resource forks upon installation? Even selecting the "Split Forks" option seems to wipe my forks and leave my apps and dll bundles useless.
Thanks and hope you had a fun time at WDW. I just saw Cirque de Soleil's La Nouba there.
Posted by: nick | January 12, 2005 10:07 PM
"Do you have any experience with the OS X Package Maker? You have any idea how to get it to not destroy your resource forks upon installation?"
I haven't used PackageMaker in any extensive capacity. My only suggestion is to switch your resource files to be data-fork based instead of resource-fork based.
Posted by: Brad Oliver | January 13, 2005 02:54 PM
Or ask about Package Maker on the xcode-users mailing list. This list is slightly misnamed as Apple welcomes discussion around any of the various developer tools.
Posted by: Bryan Pietrzak | January 14, 2005 11:48 AM
ANGRY! I mean, wait. Well yeah. I installed the official patch, and hey! Woah! Total framerate reduction. At my nominal settings before-patch, I could get 40-90 FPS on the tiny Imperial Shaft duel map. Now, i'm lucky to get 8. I turned off dynamic lights and ansiotropic filtering and everything else and the best I can crank out now is 12. I removed and reinstalled. Everything seemed fine before-patch, but applying it again yields the same results. On a PowerBook 1.5ghz with 1GB RAM and the 128MB Radeon 9700. Any tips?
Posted by: YellowSponge | January 14, 2005 04:43 PM
"Any tips?"
Not much changed in this patch, performance-wise (I assume you're talking about Jedi Academy). The only thing that jumps out at me is the "dynamic glow" setting. Before, it didn't do much. Now, it does. I can see it causing a severe performance hit in some cases, so I'd suggest turning it off and watch what happens.
Beyond that, I don't have any suggestions. Hopefully more people will pipe up about any performance problems (or lack thereof) in this patch to give me something more to go on.
Posted by: Brad Oliver | January 14, 2005 04:53 PM
But when I turn it off, nothing happens. The glow decreases slightly but is still very much there.
Posted by: YellowSponge | January 14, 2005 09:08 PM
Ah nevermind. I'm a complete idiot. I was confusing Dynamic lights and dynamic glow. Apparently you can only alter dynamic glow at the main menu. And yeah it's horrible. no greater than 12FPS even when running a solo game. Too bad I can never use it. Looks good.
Posted by: YellowSponge | January 14, 2005 09:26 PM
Well, the KotOR patch did away with the rendering errors, but it seems to have left behind some other problems:
- parts of the player's and npc's models geometry disappear in the training room on dantooine
- this is more of a preference than an actual problem, but the patched version doesn't let the game use the "prettier" water even if I run it with the Radeon 9700 drivers.
This is on a PowerBook G4 1GHz with a 64MB Radeon 9000.
(By the way, is there a way to take KotOR screenshots on a PowerBook, which lacks an F13 key?)
Posted by: ender | January 17, 2005 06:42 PM
Does the PC version also suffer from big performance drops when dynamic glow is on? No possible code path to port to fix it even if the fix would require 10.3.5 or better to see improvement? ;)
Posted by: a2daj | January 19, 2005 10:05 AM
"Does the PC version also suffer from big performance drops when dynamic glow is on? No possible code path to port to fix it even if the fix would require 10.3.5 or better to see improvement? ;"
I'm pretty sure it does.
Posted by: redsaurus | January 19, 2005 02:45 PM
"Does the PC version also suffer from big performance drops when dynamic glow is on?"
It depends on the card and the drivers. The dynamic glow effect is essentially a "blur" filter which is applied onto the image using pixel shaders. On nvidia hardware, it uses register combiners. On ATI hardware, it uses ARB fragment programs. On my GeForce 3Ti, it's not much of a speed hit, so I wouldn't be surprised if a future OSX/ATI driver update improves performance.
Posted by: Brad Oliver | January 19, 2005 03:05 PM
Interesting. I didn't know Jedi Academy used pixel shaders. 10.3.7 is suppose to have improved shader support for certain class ATI cards so I should do some tests some time for that game in particular.
Posted by: a2daj | January 20, 2005 11:49 AM
KOTOR - 1.0.3c
I'm runing this on a new 1.67 powerbook (ATI9700) with 10.3.8, and I get terrible frame rates in the Grove map on Dantooine. I have to turn it down to 800x600 with all options turned off, and the characters regularly lose control and run over the map like a key is stuck. It only seems to be in this one map, most of the other outdoor maps are slower than the inside maps, but not that bad.
Any ideas what I can do?
(BTW, I found you via Google. I don't really want to turn your blog into a Tech Support forum, if this question isn't ok, I'll go back to using Aspyr's form.)
And good luck on the house thing, it's frustrating, I did it 3 yrs ago, but once it's over, you'll be very happy.
Posted by: Heffe | February 23, 2005 07:21 PM